back to the hotel alone? If you can, I'll take the short cut down
through the woods. Good night, and--good-by." And before she could
reply, he had lowered himself over the cliff's edge and was crashing
through the underbrush on the slopes below.
XXIX
AS BRUTES THAT PERISH
It was the office building of the pipe foundry that burned on the night
of July fifteenth, and the fire was incendiary. Suspicion, put on the
scent by the night-watchman's story, pointed to Tike Bryerson as the
criminal. The old moonshiner, in the bickering stage of intoxication,
had been seen hanging about the new plant during the day, and had made
vague threats in the hearing of various ears in Gordonia.
Wherefore the small world of Paradise and its environs looked to see a
warrant sworn out for the mountaineer's arrest; and when nothing was
done, gossip reawakened to say that Tom Gordon did not dare to
prosecute; that Bryerson's crime was a bit of wild justice, so
recognized by the man whose duty it was to invoke the law.
It was remarked, also, that neither of the Gordons had anything to say,
and that an air of mystery enveloped the little that they did. The small
wooden office building was a total loss, but the night shift at the
Chiawassee had saved most of the contents; everything of value except
the small iron safe which had stood behind the manager's desk in the
private office. The safe, as the onlookers observed, was taken from the
debris and conveyed, unopened, across the road to the Chiawassee
laboratory and yard office. Whether or not its keepings were destroyed
by the fire, was known only to the younger Gordon, who, as the foreman
of the Chiawassee night shift informed a _Tribune_ reporter, had broken
it open himself, deep in the small hours of the night following the
fire, and behind the locked door of the furnace laboratory.
At another moment South Tredegar newspaperdom might have made something
of the little mystery. But there were more exciting topics to the fore.
The great strike, with Chicago and Pullman as its storm-centers, was
gripping the land in its frenzied fist, and the press despatches were
greedy of space. Hence, young Gordon was suffered to open his safe in
mysterious secrecy; to rebuild his burned office; and to let the
incendiary, sufficiently identified by the watchman, it was believed, go
scot-free.
With the greater land-wide interest to divert it, even Paradise failed
to note the curious change that had come over the younger of the
Gordons, dating from the night of burnings. But the few who came in
contact with him in the business day saw and felt it. Miss Ackerman, the
pipe-works stenographer, quit when her week was up. It was nothing that
the young manager had said or done; but, as she confided to her sister,
more fortunately situated in town, it was like being caged with a living
threat. Even Norman, the trusted lieutenant, was cut out of his
employer's confidence; and for hours on end in the business day the card
"Not in" would be displayed on the glass-paneled door of the private
room in the rebuilt office.
Not to make a mystery of it for ourselves, Tom had passed another
milestone in the descent to the valley of lost souls. Or rather, let us
say, he had taken a longer step backward toward the primitive. Daggered
_amour-propre_ is rarely a benign wound. Oftener than not it gangrenes,
and there is loss of sound tissue and the setting-up of strange and
malevolent growth. With the passing of the first healthful shock of
honest resentment, Tom became a man of one idea. Somewhere in the land
of the living dwelt a man who had robbed him, intentionally or
otherwise, indirectly, but none the less effectually, of the ennobling
love of the one woman; to find that man and to deal with him as Joab
dealt with Amasa became the one thing worth living for.
The first step was taken in secrecy. One day a stranger, purporting to
be a walking delegate for the United Miners, but repudiated as such by
check-weigher Ludlow, took up his residence in Gordonia and began to
interest himself, quite unminer-like, in the various mechanical
appliances of the Chiawassee plant, and particularly in the different
sources of its water supply.
Divested of his cloakings, this sham walking delegate was a Pinkerton
man, detailed grudgingly from the Chicago storm-center on Tom's
requisition. His task was to scrutinize Nancy Bryerson's past, and to
identify, if possible, one or more of the three men who, in January of
the year 1890, had inspected and repaired the pipe-line running from the
coke-yard tank up to the barrel-spring on high Lebanon.
To the detective the exclusion card on Tom's door did not apply, and the
conferences between the hired and the hirer were frequent and prolonged.
If we shall overhear one of them--the final one, held on the day of the
Farleys' return to Paradise and Warwick Lodge--it will suffice.
"It looks easy enough, as you say, Mr. Gordon," the human ferret is
explaining; "but in point of fact there's nothing to work on--less than
nothing. Three years ago you had no regular repair gang, and when a job
of that kind was to be done, any Tom, Dick or Harry picked up a helper
or two and did it. But I think you can bet on one thing: none of the
three men who made that inspection is at present in your employ."
"In other words, you'd like to get back to your job at Pullman," snaps
Tom.
"Oh, I ain't in any hurry! That job looks as if it would keep for a
while longer. But I don't like to take a man's good money for nothing;
and that's about what I'm doing here."
Tom swings around to his desk and writes a check.
"I suppose you have no further report to make on the woman?"
"Nothing of any importance. I told you where she is living--in a little
cabin up on the mountain in a settlement called Pine Knob."
"Yes; but I found that out for myself."
"So you did. Well, she's living straight, as far as anybody knows; and
if you can believe what you hear, the only follower she ever had was a
young mountaineer named Kincaid. I looked him up; he's been gone from
these parts for something over three years. He is ranching in Indian
Territory, and only came back last week. You can check him off your
list."
"He was never on, and I have no list," says the manhunter grittingly.
"But I'll tell you one thing, Mr. Beckham," passing the signed check to
the other, "I shall begin where you leave off, and end by finding my
man."
"I hope you do, I'm sure," says the Pinkerton, moved by the liberal
figure of the check. "And if there's anything more the Agency can do--"
In the afternoon of the same day, when the self-dismissed detective was
speeding northward toward Chicago and the car-burners, Tom saddled the
bay and rode long and hard over a bad mountain cart track to the hamlet
of Pine Knob. It was a measure of his abandonment that he was breaking
his promise to Ardea; and another of his reckless singleness of purpose
that he rode brazenly through the little settlement to Nan's door,
dismounted and entered as if he had right.
The cabin was untenanted, but he found Nan sitting on the slab step of a
rude porch at the back, nursing her child. She greeted him without
rising, and her eyes were downcast.
"I've come for justice, Nan," he said, without preface, seating himself
on the end of the step and flicking the dust from his leggings with his
riding-crop. "You know what they're saying about us--about you and me. I
want to know who to thank for it: what is the man's name?"
She did not reply at once, and when she lifted the dark eyes to his they
were full of suffering, like those of an animal under the lash.
"I nev' said hit was you," she averred, after a time.
"No; but you might as well. Everybody believes it, and you haven't
denied it. Who is the man?"
"I cayn't tell," she said simply.
"You mean you won't tell."
"No, I cayn't; I'm livin' on his money, Tom-Jeff."
"No, you are not. What makes you say that?"
"She told me I was."
"Who? Miss Dabney?"
Her nod was affirmative, and he went on: "Tell me just what she said;
word for word, if you can remember."
The answer came brokenly.
"I was ashamed--you don't believe hit, but hit's so. I allowed it was
_her_ money. When I made out like I'd run off, she said, 'No; it's his
money 'at's bein' spent for you, and you have a right to it.'"
Tom was silent for a time; then he said the other necessary word.
"She believes I am the man who wronged you, Nan. It was my money."
The woman half rose and then sat down again, rocking the child in her
arms.
"You're lyin' to me, Tom-Jeff Gordon. Hit's on'y a lie to make me tell!"
she panted.
"No, it's the truth. I was sorry for you and helped you because--well,
because of the old times. But everybody has misunderstood, even Miss
Dabney."
Silence again; the silence of the high mountain plateau and the
whispering pines. Then she asked softly:
"Was you aimin' to marry her, Tom-Jeff?"
His voice was somber. "I've never had the beginning of a chance; and
besides, she is promised to another man."
The woman was breathing hard again. "I heerd about that, too--jest the
other day. I don't believe hit!"
"It is true, just the same. But I didn't come out here to talk about
Miss Dabney. I want to know a name--the name of a man."
She shook her head again and relapsed into unresponsiveness.
"I cayn't tell; he'd shore kill me. He's always allowed he'd do hit if I
let on."
"Tell me his name, and I'll kill him before he ever gets a chance at
you," was the savage rejoinder.
"D'ye reckon you'd do that, Tom-Jeff--for me?"
The light of the old allurement was glowing in the dark eyes when she
said it, but there was no answering thrill of passion in his blood. For
one moment, indeed, the bestial demon whispered that here was vengeance
of a sort, freely proffered; but the fiercer devil thrust this one
aside, and Tom found himself looking consciously and deliberately into
the abyss of crime. Once he might have said such a thing in the mere
exuberance of anger, meaning nothing more deadly than the retaliatory
buffet of passion. But now--
It was as if the curtain of the civilizing, the humanizing, ages had
been withdrawn a hand's-breadth to give him a clear outlook on
primordial chaos. Once across the mystic threshold, untrammeled by the
hamperings of tradition, unterrified by the threat of the mythical
future, the human atom becomes its own law, the arbiter of its own
momentary destiny. What it wills to do, it may do--if iron-shod chance,
blind and stumbling blindly, does not happen to trample on and efface
it. Who first took it on him to say, _Thou shalt not kill_? What were
any or all of the prohibitions but the frantic shrillings of some of the
atoms to the others?
In the clear outlook Thomas Gordon saw himself as one whose foot was
already across the threshold. True, he had thus far broken with the
world of time-honored traditions only in part. But why should he scruple
to be wholly free? If the man whose deed of brutality or passion was
disturbing the chanceful equilibrium for two other human dust-grains
should be identified, why should he not be effaced?
The child at Nan's breast stirred in its sleep and threw up its tiny
hands in the convulsive movement which is the human embryo's first
unconscious protest against the helplessness of which it is born
inheritor. Tom stood up, beating the air softly with the hunting-crop.
"The man has spoiled your life, Nan; and, incidentally, he has muddied
the spring for me--robbed me of the love and respect of the one woman in
the world," he said, quite without heat. "If I find him, I think I shall
blot him out--like that." A bumblebee was bobbing and swaying on a head
of red clover, and the sudden swish of the hunting-crop left it a little
disorganized mass of black and yellow down and broken wing-filaments.
The glow in the dark eyes of the woman had died down again, and her
voice was hard and lifeless when she said:
"But not for me, Tom-Jeff; you ain't wantin' to kill him like my brother
would, if I had one."
"No; not at all for you, Nan," he said half-absently. And then he
tramped away to the gate, and put a leg over Saladin, and rode down the
straggling street of the little settlement, again in the face and eyes
of all who cared to see.
The bay had measured less than a mile of the homeward way when there
came a clatter of hoof-beats in the rear. Tom awoke out of the absent
fit, spoke to Saladin and rode the faster. Nevertheless, the pursuing
horseman overtook him, and a drawling voice said:
"Hit's right smart wicked to shove the bay thataway down-hill, son."
Tom pulled his horse down to a walk. He was in no mood for
companionship, but he knew Pettigrass would refuse to be shaken off.
"Where have you been?" he asked sourly.
"Me? I been over to McLemore's Valley, lookin' at some brood-mares that
old man Mac is tryin' to sell the Major."
"Did you come through Pine Knob?"
"Shore, I did. I was a-settin' on Brother Bill Layne's porch whilst you
was talkin' to Nan Bryerson. Seems sort o' pitiful you cayn't let that
pore gal alone, Tom-Jeff."
"That's enough," said Tom hotly. "I've heard all I'm going to about that
thing, from friends or enemies."
"I ain't no way shore about that," said the horse-trader easily. "I was
'lottin' to say a few things, m'self."
Tom pulled the bay up short in the cart track.
"There's the road," he said, pointing. "You can have the front half or
the back half--whichever you like."
Japheth's answer was a good-natured laugh and a tacit refusal to take
either.
"You cayn't rile me thataway, boy," he said. "I've knowed you a heap too
long. Git in the fu'ther rut and take your medicine like a man."
Since there appeared to be no help for it, Tom set his horse in motion
again, and Japheth gave him a mile of silence in which to cool down.
"Now you listen at me, son," the horse-trader began again, when he
judged the cooling process was sufficiently advanced. "I ain't goin' to
tell no tales out o' school this here one time. But you got to let Nan
alone, d'ye hear?"
"Oh, shut up!" was the irritable rejoinder. "I'll go where I please, and
do what I please. You seem to forget that I'm not a boy any longer!"
"Ya-as, I do; that's the toler'ble straight fact," drawled the other.
"But I ain't so much to blame; times you ack like a boy yit, Tom-Jeff."
Tom was silent again, turning a thing over in his mind. It was a time to
bend all means to the one end, the trivial as well as the potent.
"Tell me something, Japhe," he said, changing front in the twinkling of
an eye. "Is Nan coming back to the dog-keeper's cabin when the family
leaves the hotel?"
"'Tain't goin' to make any difference to you if she does," said
Pettigrass, wondering where he was to be hit next.
"It may, if you'll do me a favor. You'll be where you can see and hear.
I want to know who visits her--besides Miss Ardea."
Brother Japheth's smile was more severe than the sharpest reproach.
"Still a-harpin' on that old string, are ye? Say, Tom-Jeff, I been
erbout the best friend you've had, barrin' your daddy, for a right smart
spell o' years. Don't you keep on tryin' to th'ow dust in my eyes."
"Call it what you please; I don't care what you think or say. But when
you find a man hanging around Nan--"
"They's one right now," said the horse-trader casually.
Tom reined up as if he would ride back to Pine Knob forthwith.
"Who is it?" he demanded.
"Young fellow named Kincaid--jest back f'om out West, somewheres.
Brother Bill Layne let on to me like maybe he'd overlook what cayn't be
he'ped, and marry Nan anyhow. And that's another reason you got to keep
away."
"Let up on that," said Tom, stiffening again. "If you had been where you
could have used your ears as you did your eyes back yonder at Pine Knob,
you'd know more than you seem to know now."
There was silence between them from this on until the horses were
footing it cautiously down the bridle-path connecting the cart track
with the Paradise pike. Then Pettigrass said:
"Allowin' ther' might be another man, Tom-Jeff, jest for the sake of
argyment, what-all was you aimin' to do if you found him?"
It was drawing on to dusk, and the electric lights of Mountain View
Avenue and the colonial houses were twinkling starlike in the blue-gray
haze of the valley. They had reach the junction of the steep bridle-path
with the wood road which edged the Dabney horse pasture and led directly
to the Deer Trace paddocks, and when Japheth pulled his horse aside into
the short cut, Tom drew rein to answer.
"It's nobody's business but mine, Japhe; but I'd just as soon tell you:
it runs in my head that he needs killing mighty badly, and I've thought
about it till I've come to the conclusion that I'm the appointed
instrument. You turn off here? Well, so long."
Brother Japheth made the gesture of leave-taking with his riding-switch,
and sent his mount at an easy amble down the wood road, apostrophizing
great nature, as his habit was. "Lawzee! _how_ we pore sinners do tempt
the good Lord at every crook and elbow in the big road, _toe_ be shore!
Now ther's Tom-Jeff, braggin' how he'll be the one to kill the pappy o'
Nan's chillern: he's a-ridin' a mighty shore-footed hawss, but hit do
look like he'd be skeered the Lord might take him at his word and make
that hawss stumble. Hit do, for a fact!"
XXX
THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY
On the night of the fire, Ardea had remained on the cliff's edge until
the blaze died down and disappeared, which was some little time, she
decided, before Tom could possibly have reached the foot of the
mountain.
When there was nothing more to be seen she went back to the hotel and
called up the Young-Dicksons, whose cottage commanded a short-range view
of the Gordon plant. It was Mrs. Young-Dickson who answered the
telephone. Yes; the fire was one of the foundry buildings--the office,
she believed. Mr. Young-Dickson had gone over, and she would have him
call up when he should return, if Miss Dabney wished.
Ardea said it did not matter, and having exhausted this small vein of
distraction she returned to the music-room and the Bach fugue, as one,
who has had a fall, rises and tries to go on as before, ignoring the
shock and the bruisings. But the shock had been too severe. Tom Gordon
had proved himself a wretch, beyond the power of speech to portray,
and--she loved him! Not all the majestic harmonies of the inspired
_Kapellmeister_ could drown that terrible discord.
The next day it was worse. There was a goodly number of South Tredegar
people summering at the Inn, and hence no lack of companionship. But
the social distractions were powerless in the field where Bach and the
piano had failed, and after luncheon Ardea shut herself in her room,
desperately determined to try what solitude would do.
That failed, too, more pathetically than the other expedients. It was to
no purpose that she went bravely into the torture chamber of opprobrium
and did penance for the sudden lapse into the elemental. It was the
passion of the base-born, she cried bitterly. He was unworthy, unworthy!
Why had he come? Why had she not refused to see him--to speak to him?
Such agonizing questions flung themselves madly on the spear points of
fact and were slain. He had come; she had spoken. Never would she forget
the look in his eyes when he had said, "Good night, and--good-by;" nor
could she pass over the half-threat in the words that had gone before
the leave-taking. To what deeper depth despicable could he plunge,
having already sounded the deepest of them all--that of unfaith, of
infidelity alike to the woman he had wronged and to the woman he
professed to love?
At dinner-time she sent word to her grandfather and her cousin that she
was not feeling well, which was a mild paraphrasing of the truth, and
had a piece of toast and a cup of tea sent to her room. The bare thought
of going down to the great dining-room and sitting through the hour-long
dinner was insupportable. She made sure every eye would see the shame in
her face.
With the toast and tea the servant brought the evening paper, sent up by
a doting Major Caspar, thoughtful always for her comfort. A marked item
in the social gossip transfixed her as if it had been an arrow. The
Farleys had sailed from Southampton, and the house renovators were
already busy at Warwick Lodge.
After that the toast proved too dry to be eaten and the tea took on the
taste of bitter herbs. Vincent Farley was returning, coming to claim the
fulfilment of her promise. She had never loved him; she knew it as she
had not known it before; and that was dreadful enough. But now there
were a thousand added pangs to go with the conviction. For in the
interval love had been found--found and lost in the same moment--and the
solid earth was still reeling at the shock.
Ardea of the strong heart and the calm inner vision had always had a
feeling bordering on contempt for women of the hysterical type; yet now
she felt herself trembling and slipping on the brink of the pit she had
derided.
The third day brought surcease of a certain sort. In the Gallic blood
there is ever a trace of fatalism; the shrug is its expression. It was
generations back to the D'Aubignés, yet now and then some remote
ancestor would reach up out of the shadowy past to lay a compelling
finger on the latest daughter of his race. Her word was passed, beyond
honorable recall. Somewhere and in some way she would find the courage
to tell Vincent that she did not love him as the wife should love the
husband; and if he should still exact the price, she would pay it. After
all, it would be a refuge, of a kind.
Now it is human nature to assume finalities and to base conduct on the
assumption. Conversely, it is not in human nature to tighten one knot
without loosening another. Having firmly resolved to be unflinchingly
just to a Vincent Farley, one could afford to be humanely interested in
the struggles shoreward or seaward of a poor swimmer in the welter of
the tideway. She did not put it thus baldly, even in her secret thought.
But the thing did itself.
The opportunities for marking the struggles of the poor swimmer were
limited; but where is the woman who can not find the way when desire
drives? Ardea had something more than a speaking acquaintance with Mr.
Frederic Norman who, as acting-manager of the foundry plant in Tom's
absence, had generously thrown one of the buildings open for a series of
Sunday services for the workmen, promoted by Miss Dabney and the
Reverend Francis Morelock. Since the warm nights had come, Norman had
taken a room at the Inn, climbing the mountain from the Paradise side in
time for dinner, and going down in the cool of the morning after an
early breakfast.
Being first and last a man of business, he knew, or seemed to know,
nothing of the valley gossip, or of the social sentence passed on his
chief by the Mountain View Avenue court. When Ardea had assured herself
of this, she utilized Norman freely as a source of information.
"You've known the boss a long time, haven't you, Miss Dabney?" asked the
manager, one evening when Ardea had made room for him in a quiet corner
of the veranda between the Major's chair and her own.
"Mr. Gordon? Oh, yes; a very long time, indeed. We were children
together, you know."
"Well, I'd like to ask you one thing," said Frederic, the unfettered.
"Did you ever get to know him well enough to guess what he'd do next? I
thought I'd been pretty close to him, but once in a while he runs me up
a tree so far that I get dizzy."
"As for example?" prompted Miss Ardea, leaving the personal question in
the air.
"I mean his way of breaking out in a new spot every now and then. Last
winter was one of the times, when he made up his mind between two
minutes to chuck the pipe-making and go back to college. And now he's
got another streak."
Miss Dabney made the necessary show of interest.
"What is it this time--too much business, or not enough?"
Norman rose and went to the edge of the veranda to flick his cigar ash
into the flower border. When he came back he took a chair on that side
of Miss Dabney farthest from the Major, who was dozing peacefully in a
great flat-armed rocker.
"I declare I don't know, Miss Dabney; he's got me guessing harder than
ever," he said, lowering his voice. "Since the night when the office
burned he's been miles beyond me. While the carpenters were knocking
together the shack we're in now, he put in the time wandering around the
plant and looking as if he had lost something and forgotten what it was.
Now that we've got into the new office, he shuts himself up for hours on
end; won't see anybody--won't talk--scamps his meals half the time, and
has actually got old Captain Caleb scared stiff."